Week 70: November 7 (Napoli)

"Sto limonanda cu 'na bella guagliana"

Hey guys! I hope y'all are doing well and that y'all had a great week. Today is my comp’s last p-day here in Napoli before he goes home which is pretty weird. I am grateful for the time that I have had to serve with him and for the things that I have learned from him. Okay so I would like to explain the title of my email right now because this was probably one of the most funny/awkward moments of my entire mission... Let me just try to paint this picture and image for y'all. Okay so on Saturday we were teaching the awesome little family from Capo Verde who have been living here in Italy for the past 8ish years. They are progressing really well and come to church every single week which is awesome! We taught a lesson to the little girls who are 8, 8, and 11 years old about the Restoration. We brought a white board and compared the gospel to a castle and how we can use the map (Book of Mormon) to find the castle (the gospel). It went really well and hopefully they will accept to be baptized soon. After the lesson we got ready to go to the primary activity that was happening in the church, but the mom was really tired so she asked us to walk her children there. No problem; I love little kids and they are so much fun. Like I love little kids because they love life and just don’t care what anyone thinks of them!! So we were going to the church (side note: they live in a really ghetto/sketchy area so we were like holding their hands as tight as we could) and to get there we have to take a metro stop over and then walk for a while. While we were going I started singing the Lion King and me and two of the little girls holding my hands started skipping along singing Lion King, Frozen, Trick-or-treat songs in English, Justin Bieber songs in Italian and all this stuff. It was sick and honestly so much fun. Skipping in the middle of the train station with both of them singing was like the highlight of the week. Then this is where it gets really awkward... As I am skipping along and singing I didn’t realize that our phone is ringing in my back pocket. I am still not really sure how I did it but as I was skipping along with the little girls I managed to unlock the phone and send a pre-made text to our BRANCH PRESIDENT who was calling us. That text said "Sto limonanda cu 'na bella guagliana" which in Napolitano (the dialect here) translates to "I am making out with a beautiful girl." FANTASTIC.... HAHAHAHA sooo yeah that was really really funny and just super awkward when 2 minutes later we show up at the church and he comes up to show us the text that he received and we all just started laughing. Apparently there was a missionary in the past who set that pre-made text because he thought it was funny on the phone. And it came back and I was the one who had to pay. Thanks dude... Lolololol

This week was really good though. It passed by really fast because I was able to do two scambios with Anziano Stratton and Cutler. They are both hard-working missionaries and it was cool to be able to see their different personalities, especially because they are both new here in the mission. Anziano Stratton comes from Oklahoma and is huge into football so it was funny to see the Italians' reactions when they would come up to him because he is a massive dude. We had a really good time though and worked on how we can have joy in the mission as we work and we are supposed to have fun as well as work hard. He’s a great singer, so it was fun to be singing "all of me" or “I got the magic" from Pitch Perfect while we were doing finding. I also really enjoyed working with Anziano Cutler as well. Unfortunately, nothing went right for the scambio hahah so we were left with about 4ish hours to find but it was really good. We were able to see success and I think it helped him to realize that people want to talk, you just have to be persisent and bold at the beginning. (For example, we tried to talk to this cool-looking 18-year-old, but he was like "no, I am not interested” so I started talking to him about his beard and then just worked the conversation over to how there is a living prophet today and it went well!) It was also really cool to work with Anziano Cutler in his area in Caserta because in that city is the biggest castle in Europe which was HUGE. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with all these different missionaries and to learn from them! 

We are doing our best to find some new investigators right now and we met one lady who is super nice and awesome! She has had a really hard life though because her family and she herself were involved in a gang called the "Kumorah" which is the gang that takes down the Mafia here. She told us how a lot of her family has been killed because of this and she actually can’t have her children at home because it's too dangerous. She is really searching to know if there is a God and is extremely humble so we are excited to keep teaching her! Last night we also found a new investigator who is dating one of the less-active guys we are working with. She is really solid and wants to know the truth so she accepted baptism on the first lesson. I am really excited for her! This week we have a lot of potential going on because it’s Anziano Gay's last week and we are trying to go so hard. We have a goal to find 17 new investigators and teach 5 lessons a day so it’s going to be fun. Tomorrow we are teaching one of our friends from English course who is like 50 years old but looks 35 and is a sky-diving instructor. She is super humble and so we are excited. So sick that she is a sky-diving instructor!!!!

Well, I love you all so much!! For my spiritual thought, I have a lot of different thoughts because I have been studying about the House of Israel. I have never really understood all the blessings that we can truly receive from the covenants that we make. The song "Israel, Israel, God is Calling" is so much more meaningful to me now. But something way more simple to share is a conversation that we had with this one guy as he went off on us how people who believe are just "desperate" because they need something to grab onto. I was not really okay with him saying that so we started talking about how we don’t need religion because it is controlling a desperate humanity, but instead because it is freeing... It brings liberation. I don’t know if that’s a word in English but I mean that through the freeing power of Jesus Christ we can be made free, have a hope, and a light at the end of the tunnel. The power of Jesus Christ is real and it is so important. After bearing my testimony on that the guy kinda just stared at me not really knowing what to say... I love this gospel!!

VI VOGLIO BENE!!!

Anziano Spencer 

Only pic I got with Anziano Stratton. Check out his slippers!

Writing our weekly emails.